gr5

Jeez. I feel like I'm talking to someone who isn't listening. Please reread my post and ask questions about what you don't understand. You should be calibrating Z and E, not X and Y. 18.6 instead of 20 makes perfect sense - you have 1mm of play. Go back to 100% and fix the play aka "backlash". If you don't understand what backlash is learn that word first before doing anything else.

buildTak does indeed break but it's cheap - something like 3 sheets for $15. And once you get good at it you can usually do a hundred prints without ripping it. I'm told.

Did you calibrate you Z axis like I suggested? Also calibrate your extruder - tell it to retract 10mm and see if the filament really retracts by 10mm or does it move half that. You have 50% (roughly) extrusion of what you are supposed to have. I think some wire is crossed and when you command E axis to move 10mm it only moves 5mm or the opposite with the Z axis.

Lol. Okay now that I see the second layer is underextruding just as badly your leveling is fine. You are extruding only about 50% of what you should be. Maybe try to slow the speed down by 4X. See if you get solid fill instead of the gaps. This is problem #1. Problem #2 is causing your circles not to be round and infill not to touch the border. It's called "play". when the servo (x servo looks worse in the yellow photo or which ever axis is left to right in that photo with the yellow tape just above) is commanded to move to the left to a position it doesn't go all the way and ends short. Then when it tells it to move to the right nothing happens at first and then it starts moving but always not quite as far as it needs to move. usually caused by loose belts or alternatively very high friction. I've seen this 100s of times by now. It's play. Grab the head and push it around without letting the X servo move. The head should not move more than .1mm if even that. But you have maybe 3mm of play. Look up "backlash" in wikipedia.

There's several possibilities. For example maybe it stopped extruding for 20 minutes and started back up. Much more likely though the Z axis slid down. You don't say which printer but the metal beds on the UMO+ and UM2 and UM2ext are quite heavy and if the Z stepper loses power it's common for the bed to slide down a bit and the stepper driver will cut power if it gets too hot. This has been a problem for many people with boards made in the last year and the solution is to lower the Z stepper current down to 1000ma. You should be able to set it from the front panel but will lose the setting on power cycle unless you save with I believe an M500. Try it first and if this fixes the problem ask how to save the setting permanently.

Interesting - I would remove the bottom cover permanently and when printing tip the machine a bit with a book or something and use a desk or window fan to cool the board underneath the printer. This could make a huge difference for you. I tiny bit of airflow makes a huge difference in cooling.

Nice. The last photo above shows some underextrusion on the walls - that pattern. Regarding corners "warping off the bed" - this is a common problem and easily fixed but you have to know a few tricks. Basically you need to make it stick better. Much better. So well that you will then be asking me how the hell do I get parts off the glass? here is my standard cut/paste: lifting corners, curling corners, part sticking to glass 1) Make sure the glass is clean if you haven't cleaned it for a few weeks. You want a very thin coat of PVA glue which is found in hairspray, glue stick, wood glue. If you use glue stick or wood glue you need to dilute it with water - about 5 to 10 parts water to 1 part glue. So for example if you use glue stick, apply only to the outer edge of your model outline then add a tablespoon of water and spread with a tissue such that you thin it so much you can't see it anymore. wood glue is better. hairspray doesn't need to be diluted. When it dries it should be invisible. This glue works well for most plastics. 2) Heat the bed. This helps the plastic fill in completely (no air pockets) so you have better contact with the glass. For PLA any temp above 40C is safe. I often print at 60C bed. 3) heat the bed (didn't I already say that?). Keeping the bottom layers above the glass temp of the material makes it so the bottom layers can flex a bit (very very tiny amount) and relieve the tension/stress. For PLA 60C is better than 50C. 70C is even better but then you get other "warping" like issues at the corners where they move inward but if you are desperate it's worth it. For ABS you want 110C (100C is good enough). 4) rounded corners - having square corners puts all the lifting force on a tiny spot. Rounding the corner spreads the force out more. This is optional if you use brim. 5) Brim - this is the most important of all. Turn on the brim feature in cura and do 10 passes of brim. This is awesome. 6) Squish - make sure the bottom layer is squishing onto the glass with no gaps in the brim. The first trace going down should be flat like a pancake, not rounded like string. don't run the leveling procedure if it is off, just turn the 3 screws the same amount while it is printing the skirt or brim. Counter clockwise from below gets the bed closer to the nozzle. Don't panic, take a breath, think about which way to move the glass, think about how the screw works, then twist. This may take 30 seconds but it's worth it to not rush it. You can always restart the print.

I saw the same thing. One foot good, the next foot bad. There's nothing you can do - the brittle portions crack in the bowden near the top and then when they get to the head they get stuck a certain percentage of the time (30%? 20%? 10% - it doesn't matter - it's too often). Throw it all out. The problem is the curve in the bowden - if you could straighten that you'd be all set. For a UMO you can hang the feeder on a rope suspended above the printer and have the bowden be straight. Not so easy with a UM2. Or you could donate it to someone who has no bowden on their printer - e.g. maybe a delta printer. I see you are in USA. I recommend you get a few rolls of colorfabb from printedSolid.com until you are back in business with good filament. I also recommend you speak on the phone with someone at UM support - their english is stunningly excellent. Call early in the morning before noon east coast of USA, before 9am west coast of usa. Find out the facts of if this is fixed and these are just old batches - people are more likely to give you a more truthful answer over the phone versus though email I believe.

It was me. Those are all pretty old now. The only nozzles that still are like that photo are 3rd from the left and 2nd from the right. All the others have changed. For example we don't sell RSS 040 but now sell .5mm with zero dots. 1mm has 2+2 dots: .25mm 0 dots .4mm 1 dot .6 2 dots .8 3 dots 1.0 4 dots Also in the above photo 3 of the nozzles (first 2 on left and 4th from right) have a smaller cone. We don't sell anything like that anymore I don't think - well maybe the .15mm nozzle is like that. I forget (I'm sold out again so can't check).

Above graph is PLA only. Everything is a tradeoff - the max volumes in the graph above is what a perfectly tuned UM2 can do with brand new teflon part and so on. Notice that at 230C the max volume is about 8mm^3/sec although some people can achieve 10 or even 12mm^3/sec but with some minor underextrusion. Ultimaker tests every printer at 8 and at 230C before shipping (I was told). However you also get better quality at the lower temps. PLA is more like toothpaste at 180C and more like honey at 240C. "Honey" doesn't print as well as it moves a bit after it is placed whereas the "toothpaste" stays where you put it long enough to harden. Also if you always print at 240C but you print slow (say 1 cubic mm/sec) or don't print at all while the nozzle is at 240C you can bake the PLA into a clog. You want to keep things moving at that temperature. This is even more true with ABS I have done many prints at 240C no problem but stil...

Multiply the speeds by the ratio of layer height to get tables for other layer heights. Here are my recommended top speeds for .2mm layers (twice as fast for .1mm layers): 20mm/sec at 200C 30mm/sec at 210C 40mm/sec at 225C 50mm/sec at 240C The printer can do double these speeds but with huge difficulty and usually with a loss in part quality due to underextrusion. Different colors print best at quite different temperatures and due to imperfect temp sensors, some printers print 10C cool so use these values as an initial starting guideline and if you are still underextruding try raising the temp. But don't go over 240C with PLA. it might be more helpful to give you a table in cubic mm/sec. If you hover over the speed or layer height in cura it shows you the volume of PLA in mm^3/sec. You can use that number in this graph however the following graph is also different in that this is max volume and I recommend printing at half the max volume:

Oh yeah - I forgot to mention - use a .8mm nozzle and now your walls/shell will come out in one pass isntead of 2 and you can print with thicker layers because the .8mm nozzle has much less "resistance" than the .4mm (4X less of course - it's based on the area) so you can print with 4X volume. Anyway just printing the wall in one pass instead of 2 will double the speed right there even if you don't thicken the layers also. Thickening layers to .3mm really starts to lower the visual quality quite a bit!

Keep in mind that didier and I both run a store selling 3dsolex parts but I think we both would rather give good advice rather than advice that makes us money. Also keep in mind that the 3dsolex store is "down" for vacation for about another week. Any E3D (for 3mm filament - not 1.75mm filament) work great with the olsson block. JET nozzles are just recommended simply because they print faster (less resistance). But it's a small improvement and it also means they are slightly more likely to leak/string. But I don't think you'll notice any difference.

You can probably speed things up a lot. Well it all depends on the print but often you can print with no infill. For parts shaped like a potato versus parts shaped like forest of trees you may get great speed improvements. The obvious answer is to print thicker/faster/hotter. If you simply switch from .1mm layers to .2mm layers it will complete in half the time (11 hours versus 22 hours) but note that you probably have to increase the temperature. At your current speed of 40mm/sec and at .1mm layer height you want at least 200C. But at .2mm layers you want at least 225C. This will lower quality a bit but you will probably be fine with it. or you can go somewhere in between - .15mm layers needs about 210C at 40mm/sec. If your parts has lots of straight lines then speeding up print speed will also help but if it has lots of very short lines for example yoda or pretty much any sculpture (animal, person) then it probably won't print much faster with higher print speeds as it needs to slow down at every vertex anyway.

There haven't been any firmware bugs like that in the last 3 years so it's not that. Your 2 issues are probably unrelated. The issue about filament not coming out of the nozzle suddenly 19 hours into a 20 hour print - well that's common and can have many causes e.g. grinding due to too many retractions, brittle filament cracking in the bowden and then getting stuck in the head, feeder motor getting to hot and causing filament to get soft and grind flat, filament tangles, and a few others. The other issue - where the Z stage does "jerky motions" - I don't know what that is. I'm thinking the servo controller for the Z motor is getting to hot. This has been a recent problem especially people living in warmer climates without air conditioning. Several people fixed it by lowering their Z current (not x,y, or E) to 1000ma. You can do this from the front panel on the latest firmware - I think the latest release is in cura 15.04. Or it could be bearing issues. With power off move the bed up and down repeatedly feeling for stuck spots. going down is easy - to lift the bed use both hands near the back of the bed and lift hard enough to lift the printer off the table.

Those are ball bearings falling as neotko mentions. It's fine. However you want to grease the screw but not the linear bearings. And no oil is needed. If you have horizontal banding where you have underextruded layers it might not be the Z stage but just typical underextrusion. But if you have *overextruded* layers alternating with possibly underextruded then indeed you probably have Z bearing issues. please post a photo of a part you printed with "banding" to distinguish. The fix for the Z bearing banding issues is to take them off your plate and clean them out thoroughly getting all oil and grease out. Oil can actually jam up the bearings a bit. But I'm not 100% convinced that's your banding problem.

E3D nozzles are fine but have a bit more friction - they aren't as well polished inside. If you run the little blue screwdriver up and down the inside you can feel bumps in the E3D ones but not on the solex ones. this is more critical in the final hole where most of the "friction" occurrs. Also the length of the hole when at it's smallest is shorter for the JET nozzles. 3dsolex only sells JET nozzles for a while now but a LOT has changed since August. Anyway - that's 98% chance of being a .25mm nozzle. 3dsolex never made or shipped any nozzles smaller than .4mm that looked like that first photo other than the .25mm nozzles. The newer .25mm nozzles from 3dsolex look a little different on the outside but are the same on the inside. For people in England e3d-online are quite a bit cheaper than 3dsolex but for people outside of England I'm not sure - certainly the e3d-online nozzles sold in USA cost MUCH more than the 3dsolex nozzles. http://e3d-online.com/E3D-v6/Extra-Nozzles

Print it slower than usual and hotter than usual - it's hard to get 1mm of filament through a .4mm nozzle hole.

Can't you just tighten the set screw ("wheel screw" in photo)? You have to tighten the hell out of these - it should be so tight that the tool twists a bit. I don't know if that's a photo of your personal feeder but a year or two they changed the feeder design slightly to make it easier to get a tool into that set screw - the is a circular (mostly - or G shaped?) ridge around the hole - they removed the ridge in one spot for tightening the set screw with a straight tool.

Oh - other possibilities - the Z axis could be off by a factor of 2X. This would mean the Z is printing twice as high off the build plate as desired. This is also easily tested in pronterface (move Z 10mm and make sure it indeed moves 10mm). This is a common problem if you get the steps/mm off or if a jumper or software setting has the steppers in the wrong microstepping mode.

The problem isn't the slicer. So your bottom layer is pretty heavily underextruded. You are getting about 1/2 the plastic you need. Bottom layer's are a special case though. I'm going to guess it's because of your "leveling". Do you have a 3 screw adjustment system that you can rotate easily while it prints or is it something that requires a screwdriver? Anyway, hopefully the former. I don't know what your thread pitch is, on all the Ultimakers the levelins screws are 3mm screws with .5mm pitch. This means one complete rotation moves the bed .5mm. I would rotate about 1/2 a turn on all your leveling screws an equal amount (the bed appears to be level - just not at the right height. If you want to level when it's not printing (much harder) you want the nozzle touching the build plate when Z=0. Strongly consider using pronterface to move axes around and such when not printing - it's free and great for doing things like testing and calibrating. Also every printer is very different when it comes to nozzle temp so your 185C might be just like my 220C on my UM. But I doubt it's *that* far off. Consider printing closer to 210C as if I printed at 185C I would get some underextrusion which looks like what I see in your print. But more likely the bed level position is the main issue. Can't tell until you start the second layer. Once you start the second layer if it still looks underextruded it's not the bed.

Are you sure the knurled wheel is slipping? it is common for the extruder stepper motor to suddenly slip backwards about 1/3 of a turn followed by no extrusion until it catches back up to where it left off. If this happens you usually want to increase temperatuer (to lower viscosity as PLA is like honey at 240C and like toothpaste at 190C) or slow down the printer. The force that this feeder can put out before skipping is impressive -about 5kg or 10 pounds - enough to lift the printer off a table if you tried to do it yourself by pushing up on the filament. What temperature, layer height, and print speed are you printing at? it could be you just need some cold pulls to get all the gunk out of the nozzle - particularly off the inner walls of the nozzle.

What kind of printer do you have? It looks like loose belts or other cause of play/backlash. Usually it's the short belts - the belts to the motors. This is rare on the UM2 and common on the UMO. But it can happen on the UM2 also. What kind of material are you printing? Is it ABS? PLA? Can you show more prints? Because the light source is so close to the camera lens it makes it harder to see what the infill looks like. It doesn't look underextruded but I'm not certain. Maybe show another print from more of an angle so I can see both the top and sides of the print.

By the way, since the turkey on the right came out nicer, I think lowering the temp helped. Consider going down to 190C if you aren't there yet. I suspect you are printing very slow volume rate. Very very slow. So you should be able to go down to 170c no problem if it weren't for that Marlin feature. If the temp drops below 170C though the extruder will stop turning on purpose. That's a Marlin feature.

This print has NO RESEMBLANCE to the other print. I'm pretty sure any issues are unrelated. Clearly the print did not move. So that was not an issue with these 2 turkeys. Are these turkeys 13 hour prints? they look small like they are maybe 5cm (2 inches) across? They shouldn't take more than an hour I would think. Are they solid? I don't understand why this small part would take so long. I guess you need to post your settings. Please open the turkey gcode file using "load profile from gcode" then save your settings to a text file with "save profile...". Then post all the settings here - the entire file please. the top of the turkey on the right looks like it had cooling issues. Did you have the side fans on? They are critical to getting good prints.